In this Sept. 5, 2005 file photo, former President Bill Clinton, right, carries a young girl as he and Barack Obama visit with Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Houston. In recent days, Bill Clinton has denied charges that he made a racist comment and attacked Obama personally.

Race-card flap reopens Clinton camp wounds

The Clintons and their allies may forgive Barack Obama for beating Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary, but there’s one sore point they’re not quite ready to absolve: leaving the impression that Bill and Hillary Clinton have a race problem.

“I am not a racist,” Clinton said Monday in a testy interview with ABC News in Monrovia, Liberia, in response to a question that wasn’t quite related to that subject. "I've never made a racist comment, and I never attacked [Obama] personally."

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Obama himself never suggested that the Clintons harbored racial animus, though his campaign did at least once make that case to the media, and some of his supporters overtly denounced the former president. Former Clinton aides acknowledge that Bill Clinton, particularly in comparing Obama’s South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson’s victory, all but invited the charge from Obama’s allies.

But regardless of the real meaning of Clinton’s words, and of Clinton’s long relationship with African-Americans, this is the rift between the Clinton and Obama camps that still cuts the deepest, and the one that may have the severest consequences for Obama’s White House bid. When John McCain’s campaign manager last week accused Obama of playing the “race card,” the Clintons or their supporters could have provided a powerful rebuttal. Instead they were silent, and in private, some even quietly cheered.

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The depth of the anger in Clinton’s circle became clear Friday, when McCain’s chief strategist compared his candidate to Bill Clinton, and the Clintons seemed to accept the analogy.

"Say whatever you want about Bill Clinton, but it's deeply unfair to suggest his criticism of Obama was race-based,” McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told Politico, after his campaign blasted Obama for suggesting the McCain campaign would use his race against him. “We knew it was coming in our direction because they did it against a president of the United States of their own party.”

Hillary Clinton’s staff declined to comment, but her campaign communications director, Howard Wolfson, appeared on Fox News later that day to, in effect, back Schmidt up.

"I think the McCain camp watched our primary on the Democratic side very carefully, and they know that any accusation of racial divisiveness can be very, very harmful for a candidate's prospects," Wolfson said last Thursday.

In interviews Monday, some former Clinton aides declined to discuss the sore subject at all, because they support Obama and don’t consider it helpful. Others would discuss it only on background. But several former aides said that being tarred as racists, if not by Obama’s campaign, then by his supporters, had left deep scars on a campaign whose top officials were black women.

“We were accused of being a racist campaign, and it was very painful personally and politically for a lot of people,” said a former Clinton adviser. “People feel they lost the primary in some fashion due to that, and so there aren’t a lot of people rushing to inoculate [Obama] on that account.”